About

Built for the files nothing else opens.

Every year, more of the world's documents become unreadable. Not because the bits are gone, but because the program that wrote them is. A thesis in WordPerfect, twenty years of accounts in Lotus 1-2-3, a family newsletter in Publisher, a grandparent's letters in Works, a company's customer list in Access 97. The files sit on a drive that still spins, and nothing on a modern computer will open them.

What OldFileOpener does

OldFileOpener identifies what a file is from its bytes, explains where it came from, and converts it to a format you can open today. It currently knows 130 legacy formats across word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, publishing, images, video, audio, archives, databases, email and e-books. For the small number of formats with no open-source decoder, it tells you exactly which program will still open them.

How it works

Under the hood we orchestrate the best open-source recovery engines: the LibreOffice import filters (libwpd, libwps, libmwaw, libcdr, libvisio, libpagemaker, libqxp, libfreehand, libetonyek, libstaroffice), ffmpeg, Ghostscript, ImageMagick, DjVuLibre, 7-Zip, unar, mdbtools, libpst, FluidSynth, and our own decoders for PalmDOC, WordStar and text encodings. Our work is the catalog, the byte-level detection, the honest fidelity notes, and making all of this usable in one drop.

Privacy first

Files are processed in an isolated workspace and deleted automatically after three hours. No accounts, no tracking of file contents. Read the privacy policy.

Missing a format?

The catalog grows with demand. If you have a file we cannot identify, drop it into the detector: even a failed identification tells us which signatures to add next.